Don't believe the hyper-converged hype: Why are we spending stupid amounts on hardware?

Isn't it called the software-defined data centre?

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Storagebod In a software-defined data centre, why are some of the hottest properties hardware platforms?

There are plenty of newly formed startups that will come to mind: highly converged, sometimes described as hyper-converged, servers.

I think that it demonstrates what a mess our data centres have got into that products such as these are attractive. Is it the case that we have built-in processes that are so slow and inflexible that a hardware platform that resembles a games console for virtualisation becomes attractive?

Surely the value has to be in the software: so have we got so bad at building our data centres that it makes sense to pay a premium for a hardware platform? There is certainly a large premium for some of them.

Now I don’t doubt that deployment times are quicker, but my real concern is why we have got to this situation. It seems that the whole infrastructure deployment model has collapsed under its own weight. But is the answer expensive converged hardware platforms?

Perhaps it is time to fix the model and deploy differently because I have a nasty feeling that many of those people who are struggling to deploy their current infrastructure will also struggle to deploy these new hyper-converged servers in a timely manner.

It really doesn’t matter how quickly you can rack, stack and deploy your hypervisor if it takes you weeks to cable it to to talk the outside world or give it an IP address – or even a name!

And then the accusations will fly. You couldn’t deploy the old infrastructure in a timely manner; you can’t deploy the new infrastructure in a timely manner even if we pay a premium for it, so perhaps we will give public cloud a go...

Most of problems at present in the data centre are not technology; they are mostly people and processes. And I don’t see any hardware platform fixing these quickly. ®